The Trial - A Venerable Ancient

As mentioned in the Introduction I hope to build and paint models inspired by the 40k 2nd edition box set and the Second War for Armageddon narrative. What better place to start than with the primary subjects of that box, the Blood Angels. Having a few models already and a few more from ebay I was able to put together a great potential force worthy of a 10 year old me's dream.. But before I committed to building and painting my planned forces, and then committing that process to a blog, I thought it best to do a test to see if I could actually achieve the style and painting standard I wanted to reach.

I needed a challenge and what I stumbled upon was a painting challenge on Instagram named #dreadtober (and compiled on a blog by the creator 'm4cr0dutch') to build and paint a Dreadnought in a month (October).  What better starting point for my 2nd edition force than that the Venerable Ancient walking coffin, and a huge chunk of metal in both the lore and the hand.

 Going through my options I choose the obvious 1993 metal (lead?) Furioso dreadnought, which was quickly extracted from the loft and cleaned ready for the challenge. Preparing a metal model with its loose fitting tolerances and multiple layers of ages old glue was not simple, and I found later there were quite a few areas I had missed moulding marks. But eventually he was ready and the first coats of glorious red paint went down. Progress over the month was steady and I really enjoyed working with the older model and learning how to apply highlights so they were visible on the less than sharp 28 year old sculpting.

 Painting complete and all that was needed was transfers, but here I struggled as the sheets supplied with the model in 1993 did not match the art in the Codex of the time, but a bit of paint and just accepting some slightly oversized icons and he looks every bit the part.  Im super happy with how the finished model looks, still plenty to improve on with practice but it was a great fun little start to my project.